Art Appreciation ~ Mary Cassatt

Image via Wikipedia

Our latest Famous Impressionist Artist is

Mary Cassatt

She was different from all our previous Impressionist Artists in that she was ~

• our first woman artist

• an American

We read a short biography and viewed her art on a slide show.

Then the children wrote a brief narration on our Famous Impressionist Artist biography pages. (You’ll notice that I acted as scribe for my 8-year-old.  She will soon start to write much more on her own, but she loves to dictate her detailed narrations and I wanted all the time available for painting.)

They each chose a thumbnail painting of Cassatt’s woman and children art works and wrote about it in their minibooks.  (We have combined our lapbook minibooks with our biography pages.)

Then we looked at her works more closely in our coffee-table book Impressionist Painters by Guy Jennings.

Appreciating art is such a personal experience, and I let each chose their own painting to copy.

Mary Cassatt’s paintings look simple, but once you begin to paint, you quickly appreciate that her technique, details, colours and forms require skill and patience.

After an hour of painting we had these beautiful copies:

My middle-schooler and I chose “The Boating Party“.

My 8-year-old copied “The Little Sisters“.

These pictures were easy enough to copy, but we use grid lines to copy more complex compositions.  I often trace famous pictures and the children colour them in or paint them.

It was interesting to read that Mary Cassatt herself spent many days in the Louvre copying famous artworks!

I  urge you to include art appreciation in your school week.  Just start with something short and simple and add a little extra until you can complete a full art appreciation lesson.  (We started out slowly – and do art often participating in Sketch Tuesday.)

Blessings,

Gauguin’s Loulou

Image via Wikipedia

This year we returned to our study of Famous Impressionist Artists and looked at the life and colourful works of

Paul Gauguin

I read a short biography from Garden of Praise and some extracts from my book Impressionist Painters.

We looked at a selection of his art works.  He is most famous for the simple, yet colourful style he used once he lived in Tahiti and enjoyed the Polynesian island lifestyle.

(Just a note: I only made slight references to Gauguin’s  troubled and dissipated lifestyle and we did not include any nude paintings in our review.)

We watched a lovely slideshow of his works.

We put up our picture of Gauguin and his gallery of paintings on our wall chart.

The children wrote some biographical information on our biography pages.  They cut out and pasted the Gauguin thumbnail paintings on their minibook and pasted this on their biography notebook page.

As Charlotte Mason suggested, we will study Gauguin for a month. Each week we will focus on a new painting and do an art appreciation lesson.  This may just be a detailed oral narration of what they remember in a painting once they have sat quietly and looked at it.  Or they may write a detailed description of a painting.  Or we may create a copy of a masterpiece, we may use a similar technique in our work.  Not every lesson is an art lesson!

This week we copied ~

M. Loulou

I printed out the simple and colourful work.  I wanted the girls to copy the painting with a grid. 

We drew a simple 4 x 4 grid across the picture.

I then pencilled in a similar 4 x 4 grid on our drawing paper.

We outlined the main features of the picture, using the grid as our guidelines, comparing lines and distances square by square.

Here and there we all realized that without the grid we would have mistaken the proportions.

After a short while, we were ready to colour our pictures.

Miss. K and I both painted our picture, while Miss. L used watercolour pencils and washed over her picture with water to get the paint effect she wanted.

Completed painting before black outlines

When everything was dry, we outlined the picture in black.

Miss. L's watercolour pencil painting (8-years-old)

An easy and successful art appreciation lesson.

Miss. K's painting (11-years-old)

Nadene's painting

We have Gauguin’s M. Loulou in our heads and hearts!

How have you enjoyed famous art?

Blessings,

Pissarro with chalk pastels

The latest Impressionist Artist  we studied is

 

Image via Wikipedia

 

Camille Pissarro.

We all loved his painting of this pastoral landscape,

with two intimate peasant girls, large in the foreground,

the soft grass,

the cows gently grazing far off,

the trees in a row disappearing into the distance,

the stream,

and the farm-house seen at the top;

the famous picture of ~

Peasants guarding their cows

For this lesson we used soft chalk pastels.

This was our first attempt with a new medium and so we used a part the large page to experiment ~

colouring with light, sideways stokes,

pressing hard for dark, intense colour,

mixing and blending 2 or more colours over each other,

blending with finger, tissue and ear buds,

trying to make fine details.

We realized that these pastels are powdery

and dusty

and smudgy!

Details are quickly lost.

You can work layers over layers

until you get the colour and details required.

We looked at some pastel techniques in our Usborne ART Ideas Book of Things to Draw.

Here’s how we did our pictures:

• We drew a pencil border.

• Then, using the light green and holding the pastel flat on the side, we covered the page.

• The girls were afraid of green on the faces, so they rubbed out the green with a soft rubber.  (This was not necessary.  The layer of green is so light that the flesh colour will easily cover it.)

Now we took a light beige and outlined the girls, cows, tree trunks and other features.

I suggested that we work from the top of the page down and leave the peasant girls till last to prevent smudging on our pictures.

We first did the grass and trees with all the different colours; light green, dark green, yellow, browns and even some black.

Then we drew the cows, the river, and the farm-house.  The best method seemed is to colour the area with the light or medium colour, then use brown/ black for shadow and colour over all these with the light colour.  The pastels blend into each other easily.

We coloured the peasant girls’ clothes.  Here Miss.K used an ear bud to blend her shadows in the scarf.

The peasant girls’ clothes were easy, but we all made at least 2 or 3 attempts at the faces.  Those facial details were hard to keep clean and crisp!  When things got messy and smudgy, we rubbed the pastels out, and simply started the process again.  The pastel has no point, so fine detail is difficult.

Finally, we added more intense colour, depth and details to the grass and trees.

Once we finished, we  ‘fixed’ the pastels with a generous, fine spray of  hairspray.  The hairspray darkens the pastel initially, but dries quickly and is invisible.  Hairspray holds the powder on the page and makes it fairly smudge-proof.  (You can use special art fixative, but this is cheaper and works well if the spray is fine and even.)

We were all delighted with our pictures!

Download Famous Impressionist Artists and Famous Artist lapbooks, biography pages and Art Era Timeline for your art appreciation lessons.

Blessings,

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec Posters ~ Appreciation Lesson Ideas

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters are famous and epitomize the Post Impressionist style.

As a start our study of Toulouse-Lautrec, an Impressionist painter, we read his biography and wrote a short biography on our Famous Impressionist Artists Biography pages.

(Just a note, parents should carefully select and sensitively discuss Lautrec’s life and works with their children as his personal life and his interest in the  lives of the people of the circus and cabaret halls could be offensive or disturbing.)

www.yaneff.com gives a clear written biography and a very interesting (but please pre-view) 5 minute video of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life.  Most the posters are on one page with clear thumbnails of Toulouse-Lautrec art.

I printed the Toulouse-Lautrec minibook from my Famous Impressionist Artist Lapbook.  We have been combining our notebook and minibook pages instead of making a lapbook. (The girls paste their minibook on their biography page.)

We viewed all his posters on www.Lautrec.info.

We discussed the lines, shapes, colours and style Toulouse-Lautrec used in his posters. (Compare these at a later stage with his paintings.)

I asked the children to take note of the balance between the writing and the pictures.

We discussed important facts about poster’s writing ~

• Printing must be clear, bold, easy to read.
• Simple message with just a few important words.
• People read words at the top of the poster before the words below the pictures.
• Words painted in all UPPER case are bolder and make more impression than lower case letters.
• Simple style curls or italics give an artistic feel to the writing.

Here are UPPER case and lower case letter pages ~

Poster Letters Upper Case

Poster Letters Lower Case

I printed the posters in postcard size.

I traced them and created a simple outline.

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Toulouse-Lautrec painted in flat, simple areas of colour.  This makes the posters very simple to copy.

The kids chose their poster to colour.

You can enlarge the poster to full-page if the postcard size is too small.  My kids liked them smaller than our normal art pages and could paint several posters. (I will upload their completed posters once they have coloured them.)

Here is Toulouse-Lautrec posters, prints, my outlines and poster letter pages for you to download.  (It has 17 pages so it may take a while to open.)  Click the title below:

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Posters

A New Art Page ~ here are all our art activities on 1 page

We love art and this year we are studying Impressionists.

Because we have done so much art this year I have decided to create a new art page with a summary of all the art appreciation lessons, art activities and downloads related to our art.

We use Charlotte Mason’s approach and study each artist and his/her works over a few weeks. She says,

“Children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, reading, not books, but pictures themselves.

… After a short story of the artist’s life … the pictures are studied one at a time.  Children learn not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail.”

Charlotte Mason recommended studying one artist at a time so children become aware of that artist’s style and can recognize his works even when that particular painting was not studied.

On this page you will find the shortlinks and examples of all our art lessons and activities.

To view this new page click on the tab Art Ideas above the header picture.

I will continue to add our art activities to this page, so please click on my RSS feed or subscribe to receive emails of my latest posts just under my gravatar.

I hope these art lessons inspire you to give art a try in your homeschool! 🙂

Children Talking about their Art

We do a lot of art.

And we enjoy it!

I find that young children really enjoy the art process and they are not too concerned about the end product.

In other words, they love doing art and are not too worried about how the work looks when finished.

But around 9 or 10 years old, many children develop a critical eye of their work as they begin to mature and move into the realistic age.  As they mature they start to worry that their work “doesn’t look right”.  Basically, they can see how it should look and yet they don’t have the artistic techniques and ability to paint or draw accurately.

Children in this phase need encouragement so that they enjoy creating art and the end product.

This is also the time where we need to ask them questions about their art that help them enjoy their work.

I sometimes use these questions (often followed by the question why?)

• What is your favourite part of your painting? Every art work has some point of interest or success.
• Which figure/flower/building do you think is really good? Even though the outcome may not be perfect, the child can find the most pleasing aspect.
• Which section of the background do you like? When they look behind the detailed pictures, they will find other details or interesting areas.
• Which colours on your painting do you enjoy the most? Focus on colour rather than reality/ figures/ proportion.
• What did you enjoy doing the most on this project? This refers to the process and not the end product.  If there were more than 2 stages in the work, they can easily chose the one they enjoyed.

Here are some other activities that help children talk about and appreciate their art ~

We load our paintings on to Picasa (or any other photo software on your computer) and save a copy of the painting to file.

• With the copy we crop the best section.
• We use the fade/ glow/ soft focus to highlight an area or diminish the rest of the painting.
• We crop and enlarge a section of the painting.

We use ” unwanted” original work for further art activities

(Seeing scraps of art in a new product often creates a new enjoyment of the art work.)

• We use a small paper frame (about postcard size), we select a section that best fits the picture. Even just framing art work gives a finish that helps highlight the colours.
• Use a smaller viewfinder (a frame about the size of a matchbox), the child can select any interesting part of the picture to enlarge and redraw as an abstract work.
• Make an abstract collage from the painting. See a wonderful example at Barb’s Harmony Art Mom ~  Watercolour Painting Collage.
• Laminate the art work for table placemats.
• Use a selection of art works for calendars or gift tags.
• Scrapbook with art works.  (I don’t make conventional scrapbook pages, but use art scraps for background paper for scrapbook pages.)
• Use sections of art works for making cards.
• Cut up art into strips and laminate them for bookmarks.

I loved these 8 Questions to Ask your Children about their Art I found in Rachel Lynette’s website minds-in-bloom.com.

1. What can you tell me about your picture? This open-ended question is a great way to get kids talking about their art. It is especially good if you cannot tell what the picture is. Nothing worse than saying, “What a lovely horse.” only to have the child tell you it is supposed to be a dog.
2. How did you get the idea for this picture? By explaining the inspiration, the child recognizes his own creative spark and makes the connection from real-life events to artistic creation
3. What do you like about your picture? Encourages the child to look carefully at his art and make a judgment. More importantly, this question teaches your child to value his own internal validation rather than performing in hopes of gaining the approval of others.
4. What title would you give this work? Titles can offer a new dimension to a piece of art. Also, a title encourages your child to think about the main idea or concept of her work.
5. Why did you…..use brown for the sky? Make the girl so much larger than the boy? Use only the bottom of the paper? Basically ask why the child decided to draw or color a specific element of the work in a particular way. Make sure your tone is neutral – you are asking for clarity, not judging or criticizing the work.
6. How were you feeling when you made this picture? Connecting emotions with creative expression.
7. How do hope other people will feel when they look at your picture? Allows the child to put himself in another’s place and imagine how his work affects that person. You could also make this question more specific by naming a particular person: How do you think grandma will feel when she looks at your picture?
8. If you could make this picture again, what would you do differently? Professional artists often make many versions of the same picture, trying new things, tweaking, experimenting. Encourage your young artist to do the same.

What suggestions do you have for talking with your children about their art?

Our Monet inspired “Water Lily Pond” Paintings

Monet painted many water-lily paintings, but this one of his Japanese bridge across the water-lily pond inspired us!

A print of Monet's Water Lily Pond

We had a family visiting us for the week and some of them joined us for this enjoyable art activity.

Here are the steps we took:

First we looked at Monet’s Water Lily Pond in our book Impressionists by Juy Jennings and looked closely at the enlarged pictures of his water lilies in Joy Richardson’s Looking at Pictures An Introduction to Art For Young People.

We all drew a frame around a large A3 page in landscape.

We looked at the horizontal line where the pond ended and the background began.  We drew a horizontal line just under half way up the page. Above this and across the page we drew 3 curving lines in pencil for the bridge.

Some basic pencil lines for horizon and bridge

We used white oil pastels and, pressing heavily, drew over the bridge lines.  (These white lines will resist the water paint wash.)

Thick, heavy white oil pastel lines for the bridge

Now we used sponges and water-colour paint to paint the water and background trees.  We sponged the water in various blues and greens in horizontal strokes, while we sponged the background vertically in various greens and yellows.

Sponge painting the water and the trees

We used off-cut pieces of sponge with large, medium and small oval shapes to dab medium green craft paint (which is thicker and more opaque) for the lily leaves.  I encouraged them to paint large shapes in clusters at the bottom of the pond, where the lily leaves were closer,  and as the lily leaves appeared further away, we painted smaller leaves, until at the horizon line, the lily leaves were simple dots of green.

Dabbing lily pads leaves with oval-shaped sponges

Now we used paint brushes.  Monet painted a thin dark green shadow at the base of most his leaves and a highlight of light green across the top on many of his lily leaves.

Shadow lines under lily pads

With the lily leaves painted, we added details to the water.  We dabbed short strokes of darker blues and purples to create ripples and shadows. We used white to make dry brush strokes for the lilies, or with 3 short strokes, we painted the flowers between the lily leaves.

Lily flowers and purple and dark blue ripples in the pond

We now returned to the bridge.  We used white paint and painted over the oil pastel lines (which was slightly obscured by the paints) and then we added light blue for the shadows on the bridge.

Painting the bridge in white and light blue

We added details to the trees, adding dabs of darker greens, yellows and purples.

Adding details to the trees in the background

Finally, we added a few dots of pink to some of the lily flowers.

Our paintings were complete!

Here are the final works of art ~

Miss. L, 8 years old

Miss A, 9 years old

Mrs. G's lovely painting

My own painting

This art lesson was really enjoyable.  We took about an hour in total.  The lesson was easy to break into steps and stages.  I needed to remind everyone to look at the clusters of lily leaves.  Also, the younger children painted the lilies on top of the lily leaves and they needed to look carefully to see that the lilies were also in clusters and painted in between the leaves.  The dark shadows some people painted looked overwhelming at first, but with smaller, finer strokes of the same colour spread out in between the leaves, the shadows looked really good in the end.

My guest mommy thoroughly enjoyed having the time just to sit and paint.  Her greatest joy was that she did not have to copy the original painting – just paint her interpretation of it.  She was delighted to see how easy it seemed.

How do I use the Art Era Timeline?

Here are some tips and practical ideas on how to use your downloaded Art Era Timelines.

Bind the downloads as an Art Book of the Centuries ~

Image via Wikipedia

I bound my printout and made a simple spiral bound book and we use it to reference our artist or art movement.

The book format works well if you  flip through the pages to find artist.  Your children may recognise the thumbnail of the work studied.  They will also notice other works of the same art style.

Your children may need to transfer the dates to a more formal timeline for clarity.

We use a Wall Chart ~

This is a wonderful method because the children can see in one glance, where and when events and eras took place in relation to other events in History.

Timeline Wall Chart

I made this chart myself on the back of our Large World Map.  I divided the vertical space into the centuries from 5000 BC to 2000 AD and divided the lines across in decades.

My timeline zigzags to form a flowing timeline.

I coloured some of the timeline eras in different colours; the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution etc.

Also, because I covered the wall chart in packaging tape to protect it, we write details on our wall chart with coloured white board markers.

This is how we use our Art Era Timeline on the Wall Chart:

• We write the artist’s name and birthdate and stick the picture of the artist or the thumbnail of his most famous works on the timeline.
• We use a different colour for different art eras and mark off all the years that the art movement occurred.
• We only update the timeline once a week, or even less.  I find it helpful for an introduction to an artist.
• The kids look for the year and write the name of the artist above his biographic dates.
• It is also a good way of concluding a study.  When we have finished studying an artist, we update the timeline and see how his works fit into an era.

As you can see, the chart does get crowded.  This is the only disadvantage of a smaller scale wall chart.

Here you can see the timeline figures I use ~

Timeline Figures

These came with my first kindergarten Sonlight purchase. They did not come with all the artists we have studied. We make/ draw/ download pictures of famous artists for the timeline.

I coloured the edges of my figures to help distinguish between the different history cores I was using.

You could use this system to highlight Art figures ( highlighted in 1 colour) different from Notable People (edged in another colour), History (edged in another colour),  from Inventions (a 3rd colour) or Wars (a 4th colour).

At the end of our year we play games and use our timeline figures for  review:

• group the figures according to categories (discoverers, artists, Bible characters)
• quiz – give 2 facts for each figure
• arrange 3/5 figures in time order

Here is our Book of Centuries Timeline ~

Book Of Centuries Time time

We used this timeline method while we were travelling and I could not display our timeline chart in our school room.

Each child pastes in their pictures or information and uses the blank page to write more information.

It is a very personal timeline.  Each child adds to their Book of Centuries and it becomes a rich historical resource.

An adolescent needs to start a new Book of Centuries as they sometimes become critical of earlier entries.  They need a blank book to map and record their more mature insights and intellectual understanding.

There are some excellent Book of Centuries with sections devoted to different themes on each page.

This is more appropriate for older students.  Young children sometimes cannot “see” the full picture and how their details fit into the larger scheme of time.

In the same way as explained above, add the names, biographies, thumbnails, pictures and information of the artists or art movements on the relevant pages.  This method offers much more space and so your children can fill more information on the page than on the wall chart.

And lastly, you could make a continuous Timeline Strip ~

I don’t have my first strip timeline photographed, but I used a looooooong strip of sturdy paper, divided into all the centuries and pasted this all around the room at the top of our school room wall.

This was a fantastic method!  The children could see exactly where and when historical events occurred.

It was easy to refer to Biblical eras and see how long ago these events took place.  Also,there were several eras when lots of new events, inventions and changes took place in very short space of time.  This was easy to see during the Renaissance or in the late 18th Century. This cluster could be expanded by making the timeline strip wider to accommodate all the figures and information.

One disadvantage is that the children can’t write or paste items on the wall strip because it is a struggle to climb up to reach the timeline.

You can read more here about our history timeline.

Simply Charlotte Mason have a Book of Centuries pictured and described here and a free pdf download here.

Heart of the Matter offers simple directions on how to make a time line here.

Heather made a free Book of Centuries template download.  (You need to write your own years in on the top of the pages.)

And, of course, please visit my Free Pages to make sure you have downloaded all the free stuff! 🙂

Painting our Monet Inspired Houses of Parliament

Appreciating Monet’s Impressions of light on water

Houses of Parliament by Monet

In our series of Impressionist painters, we started our first study of Monet.

We have enjoyed Charlotte Mason’s approach of art appreciation ~

• We read a brief biography about Claude-Oscar Monet and viewed a lovely slide show of his works.  Visit claudemonetgallery.org for more of his works in a slide show.
• Then we looked at some more paintings in our coffee table book on Impressionists.
• The girls will narrate a biography on our Famous Impressionist Artists Biography Pages.
• I have created  lovely minibooks to add to our Impressionist Lapbook/ Notebook.
• We zoomed in and looked in detail at an excellent online picture of Houses of Parliament at artchive.com.
• Next, we painted Monet’s famous  Houses of Parliament.

Here’s what we did ~

On a large A3 size page, draw a horizontal line about 1/3 from the bottom of the page.  Outline the buildings and lightly sketch the sun’s position.

Sketch very basic outlines

We used sponge brushes to wash the sky, water and buildings.

Washing the backgrounds

Sponge wash the background

Using paint brushes and short dabs of paint, we used the colours and the diagonal angles that Monet used to paint his sky.  We used those same colours and horizontal brush stokes to colour the water.  We painted the sun yellow and added the vibrant orange stokes to the sky and the reflections in the water.  Key to the success of this technique is to use small stokes and leave spaces between the dabs of colour.  We added purples and greens and blues until the sky and water looked like Monet’s.

Short brush stokes of colours

Once the sky and water was “done”, we painted the buildings.  We used mostly blacks and purples and blues.

Adding the black and purple strokes to buildings

And here are our completed paintings of Monet’s Houses of Parliament ~

Painting by Miss.L 8-years old

Mom's painting

Miss.K 10-year-old

I often ask the kids what they liked best in their painting.  They always find something they liked or enjoyed.  As we looked at our paintings, we noticed how different they all were.  Miss. L captured Monet’s gloomy, foggy mood and Miss.K caught the feeling and movement of Monet’s paint style.

All our works were so unique and we all enjoyed this art activity!

Appreciating Cezanne’s Cubist Landscapes

We have continued studying Cezanne’s work the past few weeks and this week we looked at his landscapes.

He painted most of his landscapes in a cubism style.

We examined how the artist broke areas of the picture into geometric shapes and used line and colour to create different planes of colour on his objects and spaces.  We looked at our Art Era Timeline and found Cubism and looked at the other art from that art movement.  I created the Art Era Timelines for this reason ~ I want my children to identify the style and the art movement.  With frequent exposure to art this way, I trust that they will start to name the art styles and movements when they see similar art. We used dry-wipe markers and wrote Cezanne and Cubism on our wall chart timeline.

We reviewed his works on a slide show ~ Ambient Art – Cezanne.  Many pictures are ‘familiar’ and we recognised many of Cezanne’s famous apple and orange still lives. We also looked at another Cezanne slide show on Garden Of Praise.com. Then we studied our picture for this week from our Impressionist Painters book by Guy Jennings  ~ Landscape with Rocks and Trees.

I prepared an outline sketch for this lesson.

It is such a help to have the outlines drawn if we need to focus on detailed techniques.  (I simply trace over the picture from our coffee table book, go over it with a black fineliner, then scan and enlarge the image.) The right hand side of this outline features cubist lines which Cezanne painted, but I excluded these guidelines on the left hand side of the picture. Although all our art is similar, you will notice we used different shapes, colours, textures and mediums and our pictures have their unique qualities. This type of art is not interpretive, but technical.

You may download your outline drawing here ~ Cezanne Landscape outline for cubism

The girls used water-colour pencils.  They hatched little lines in an amazing array of colours they saw in the original painting. Then they painted over their pencils with water.

My youngest became frustrated with lack of progress using the cubist technique and she turned to my oil pastels.  I found they worked so well.  I had covered areas with deep layers of oil pastels.  Eventually we were all colouring the page with the pastels.

Miss.L's landscape

Miss.K's Landscape

And this is our artwork for our gallery!